Interview with the CEO: Why are Lose It! benefits so darn good?

How did Lose It!’s incredible benefits come to fruition? Director of Marketing, Erin Webster, sits down with Charles Teague to find out.

Since joining Lose It! in 2017, it’s been clear to me that our leadership team is actively trying to make this company an incredible place to work. With perks like a company retreat in Paris, four day summer work-weeks, and a gym membership, I was curious about how these out-of-the-ordinary benefits became such a priority. I got real with Charles to ask why, and his answers were awesome.

Erin: What’s the philosophy around the benefits we offer to employees? Has this always been a focus of the company?

Charles: Since the company started in 2008, we’ve been focused on maximizing our impact on our members; how can we help the most amount of people reach their healthy weight? We learned early on that the best way to do that is to build a business for the long haul. With this in mind, we’ve intentionally made financially smart decisions, grown slow and steady, and invested in our employees. I believe strongly that happy employees who feel taken care of are more likely to do good work and join Lose It! for the marathon that we’re running, so I’ve tried to make Lose It! a great place to be. As the company has grown, we’ve been able to add more benefits to our list, but great benefits have been at the heart of our culture from the beginning.

We fully believe that when employees are happier and healthier, they do their best work. This is especially important with such a small team because the impact is greater. If just two people are unhappy and aren’t contributing their potential, that’s a potential 10% hit to productivity across the whole company. We’re always diligently working to make sure our team members are loving their jobs.

Erin: Are there companies you look to as hallmarks of great culture? Any ‘role-models’ of sorts for setting these benefits?

Charles: Oh yeah, I definitely have some role-model companies that I look to for inspiration and best practices around building great companies. I admire companies like Basecamp (formerly 37Signals) and Buffer for both their approaches to employee benefits, and their openness and transparency in decision making. I read their blogs often to check in on our benefits compared to some of the most forward-thinking companies in the tech world. I worked at Microsoft for several years and one of the underrated aspects of working there really was their benefits and benefits approach- another great company, though very different than Lose It!. That being said, I aim to structure our benefits program around the needs of our specific team (not some tech world norm) so we tailor our benefits program accordingly.

Erin: Both of those companies adopt a largely remote work environment. Is that something you think we’ll move to here at Lose It!?

Charles: I’m actually a huge advocate for both in-person work environments and remote work cultures. I believe that the best company will fully embrace one or the other, because it’s rough going half way. If I built a new company I might consider a remote-only one, but since we started Lose It! in person we would find it tough to transition to a remote-only culture. We’re all in on in-person (with flexibility built in) and are happy with it.

Erin: As a small company, we can’t offer every benefit that we want to, so how do you prioritize what benefits to roll out?

Charles: We look at two things when deciding on how to implement a benefit:

One: will it make employees lives better or easier? We look to see what burden a specific benefit will relieve from employees before adding it. Benefits with higher potential to relieve employee burden are prioritized. A great example of this is our health insurance benefit. We did a lot of research on health insurance options, and are paying for a really nice insurance package for employees. Covering the costs into a well respected insurance program means that employees don’t have to worry about health insurance for their family.

Two: Is this benefit more valuable than just the financial portion of it? The second piece of how we distribute benefits is to try to look at the perceived value of a benefit over a handout of cash. One example is our gym/ wellness benefit. If we were to give employees a $90 per month pay increase, they probably wouldn’t spend it on a gym membership. There’s an added benefit of the company setting up and managing the membership for employees. The company selfishness comes in here as well; we’d much rather give you a $90 gym membership in the hopes that you’ll use it to stay healthy and balanced, instead of a $90 pay increase.

Erin: We just changed our commuter benefit since we moved into the city (from Seaport to Boston Common). Why did we make that change?

Charles: When we moved to the Tremont Street location, the public transportation options got a lot better for employees. We are now a very short walk to the biggest T stations in the city, and more of our employees are able to take advantage of public transportation. We still offer to pay for either a monthly parking pass or a monthly T pass for employees, but since so many more employees are opting to take the T, our spending for this benefit was expected to decline. We looked at a few different options, and decided that we would keep our costs for this benefit about the same, and offer an additional benefit to the T riders. As of this year, employees who take public transportation to work also have a $50 reimbursable benefit to cover the cost of a few taxis or Uber/ Lyft rides each month. We hope this will further incentivize employees to choose the public transportation option.

Erin: Have there been times that you considered scaling back our benefits program? Why did you make the decisions you did at that time?

Charles: I think there’s only been one time that we considered scaling back. Our health insurance came up for renewal and the premiums were raised quite a bit. We looked at a lot of other options and were considering scaling back from paying the premiums for PPO coverage to HMO coverage only. Before making the decision, we sent a simple survey to every employee focused only on whether this change would result in additional burden on them or their family. When a handful of employees expressed concern, we decided to pay the extra premium cost to keep the better coverage for employees. We’re fortunate to be in a financial position as a company that we don’t have to make those hard decisions at this point.

Erin: Our first international company retreat is scheduled this summer in Paris. What made you want to bring the company and our families abroad for a week, and why Paris?

Charles: The whole idea for this international retreat was to find a way to give employees a benefit that allows them to embrace life experiences while at this job, instead of deferring them to later in life. We think that providing a trip like this to employees and their families will help create diversity and creativity in how our employees work, deepen relationships between employees and encourage additional independence and autonomy in our work environment. We wanted to provide an experience to our employees that most companies won’t be able to.

Paris is just an incredible city. It has culture, it’s a dynamic environment, and it provides a mix of foreign and familiar elements that I find fascinating. It’s also a fairly safe city and is a good place for employees to bring their families to. We really tried to choose a site where people want to go and that people want to take their family with them to share the experience. It’s very expensive, but the positive aspects of the city outweigh the added cost.

Benefits mentioned: Company retreat to Paris in 2018, all expenses paid for employee and families/spouses.

Erin: Are there any benefits that aren’t listed on our page that are just part of our culture?

Charles: A few things that we do aren’t official benefits, per-say, but are perks of working at Lose It!:

We monitor industry salaries annually to make sure our compensation stays competitive with the market.

We introduced 4-day work weeks for summer (June 24 through September 8th). The shortened work weeks must include Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (unless an employee is taking a vacation day), but we all can take Monday or Friday off to extend our summer weekends.

We offer a profit sharing plan that rewards all employees for the company achieving its goals.

Erin: What about parental leave for employees? Is that something that the company officially recognizes?

Charles: Our vacation policy really encourages employees to take time off each year to be with their families, but it’s a little different when an employee becomes a parent. We haven’t officially set up a parental leave policy, and would like to keep this as a ‘take what you need’ policy as long as we can. We think putting a set time limit on a leave like this can create unnecessary stress when we’d rather the new parents focus on being with their family during that exciting time. We’ve had two adorable Lose It! babies, both paternal leave, and the policy worked well.

Benefits mentioned: open vacation policy, parental leave

Erin: The company offers a 401K program now but no company matching, which is something a lot of larger employers offer. What are your thoughts on that?

Charles: 401k matching is something we very much want to do, and it’s primarily been due to the cost of such a program that we haven’t implemented one yet. I really like the idea of 401k matching because it helps people make the smart decision about saving for retirement. I’m hoping we can roll this benefit out next year.

Benefits mentioned: 401k plan

Erin: What’s your favorite benefit we offer?

Charles:I think I’m most excited this year about the summer hours, both for the benefit itself and the novelty of it. It’s the first year we’ll be trying this benefit, so we’ll have to see how it works.

I’m also a big fan of our profit sharing program. One of the classic ‘problems’ with startups is that you typically have to sell the company for anyone to be really rewarded for their work beyond just their salary. In the early days at Lose It!, I asked some of the first team members to “trust me” that we could build a company that rewarded them even if we didn’t sell the company, and they did. Once we became profitable, we started sharing profits.

Benefits mentioned: summer hours, profit sharing

Charles: One of the most exciting things over the years is that that we were able to fulfill our ”trust us” promises to our earliest employees, then keep getting better. As we’ve grown, everyone at Lose It! is able to benefit from the company having a positive impact on the world.

Not all benefits were mentioned here. For the full list, check out our jobs site: www.loseit.com/jobs.

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Hi, I'm Erin! I have been leading the marketing team at Lose It! since April, 2017 and have spent the earlier part of my career in the healthcare marketing industry. When I'm not at the Lose It! office, I'm often found teaching indoor cycling classes, checking out a new fitness class, or exploring a new part of this beautiful city. A New Englander through and through, some of my favorite foods are regional classics: lobster roll, corn on the cob and apple pie!
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